Writing across borders: An online collaboration

Online International Learning (OIL) can embed soft skills into the academic curriculum and provide students and staff with an opportunity to interact with their counterparts internationally. This pilot study aims to evaluate how telecollaborative writing tasks between the UK and Finnish students by an online platform can benefit both students’ learning experience in academic writing and contribute to EAP curriculum and material design. In the study, there are two groups of learners in different geographical contexts, Finland and the UK. The Finland-based students are mostly Finnish, while those studying in the UK are almost all from China. In both cases, the target language is English. The students in Finland worked in pairs to create authentic case study materials, and the students in the UK, in what we characterize as 'stimulus writing ', produced reports based on the case studies they had been given. Questionnaires were employed to collect quantitative results showing students’ perceptions towards the task. Feedback from the students was positive, and they expressed an interest in direct interaction with the other cohort. While this was not possible, for logistical reasons, in this pilot study, we plan to implement this in future iterations of the project.